Columbus is web central for web addresses

Sunday

Mar 23, 2014 at 12:01 AMMar 23, 2014 at 3:12 PM

In at least one regard, central Ohio is the center of the Internet universe. More Internet Protocol addresses - the deeply encrypted type consisting of a series of numbers - are registered here than anywhere else on the globe.

Tim Feran, The Columbus Dispatch

In at least one regard, central Ohio is the center of the Internet universe.

More Internet Protocol addresses — the deeply encrypted type consisting of a series of numbers — are registered here than anywhere else on the globe.

It’s a strange fact unearthed by the March issue of National Geographic, and it stems from the city’s history as a computing hub, thanks to its collection of data centers, telecom businesses and the military.

The U.S. Department of Defense owns more IP addresses than anyone else in the world — about 1.2 percent of the Internet space — and registers them all in Columbus, a National Geographic editor said in an email.

“Columbus is indeed the epicenter of the IP address market,” said Jason Treat, senior graphics editor at National Geographic.

Overall, Columbus has 224 million IP addresses, almost 200 million more than a large international capital such as London — and more IP addresses than all of Africa, South America, Central America and the Middle East combined.

The main reason for the strange statistic involves the U.S. military.

Military IP addresses are registered as having a real-world street address of 3390 E. Broad St., Columbus. That’s the Defense Supply Center, which contains the Department of Defense Network Information Center.

“Why and how they are used isn’t known to the public,” Treat said.

Big IP addresses can be seen as analogous to telephone area codes, in which each address can contain thousands of phone numbers. Most personal computers and devices have their own IP address.

But, while we don’t know what the military does with them, we do know why they have so many, said Matt Grover, executive director of technology at local marketing firm Resource.

The reason dates back decades.

“What we know of as the public Internet today began as the Department of Defense’s ARPANET network,” Grover said. When ARPANET — the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network — evolved into the Internet, “a lot of other government entities, corporations and even universities got into the IP land-grab early on, while commercial ISPs (Internet Service Providers) actually got in the game years later.”

So, because the military was initially involved in what became the Internet, Grover said, it was only natural “that the military has so many dang addresses.”

Telecommunications accounts for most of the rest of the phenomenon.

“Columbus is basically the telecom capital of the world,” said Toby Miller, a software designer at Resource. “Back in the late ’80s, UUNet (one of the largest Internet service providers) located here as a way to transfer data for all of the backbones between the East and West coasts.”

Those data transfers happen at the intersection of two fiber-optic networks on the Far North Side, an intersection that is not so coincidentally right next to the headquarters of one of the region’s biggest data facilities, DataCenter.BZ.

Gordon Scherer, CEO of DataCenter.BZ, quickly enumerated some of the other reasons Columbus would have so many IP addresses, in addition to the military: “Call centers and Web hosting companies are also big users,” he said.

Scherer said that many IP addresses were registered to such major players as LCI, Qwest, AT&T, IBM, Battelle, Ohio State University and the state government.

“These are but a few that quickly come to mind,” Scherer said. “It’s a great fact to add to the facts about Columbus, Ohio.”

So, what does all of this mean?

“It’s an interesting story,” Grover said, “But there’s nothing that actually elevates us in a practical sense. You can’t browse the Web any faster, for instance. It’s just an interesting way that we’re connected to Internet history.”

tferan@dispatch.com

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